Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Susan Briante, The Market Wonders

I have a friend who asks about “truth” in
poetry. Whenever he does, I want to send him a valentine on musty pink paper.
He lives in a Mid-Century modern house with Mid-Century modern furniture
carefully culled from vintage stores and eBay. He owns an old mahogany stereo
cabinet, jacked up so you can listen to an iPod through it. That’s the kind of
truth in which I am interested.

I think as poets we are always excited by
language, so yes there is something in addressing a new vocabulary. I was also
very interested in engaging with the economic “crisis” of 2008, which marked
the beginning of a new economic normal for many people as well as the beginning
of a kind of narrative crisis. We measure of our “health” in the United States
through economic indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Most news
broadcasts end with those numbers. But why? That’s not an inevitable choice.
The nation of Bhutan, for example, measures Gross National Happiness
(http://www.gnhbhutan.org/about/) instead of Gross National Product. I created many
of the poems that make up the manuscript, The
Market Wonders, by recording the closing number from the Dow Jones
Industrial Average (DJI), then plugging that number in a variety of search
engines that would lead me to texts. I use those texts and closing number of
the DJI to inspire or influence the poems I was writing. You can find examples
of them here
(http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/october-14%E2%80%94-dow-closes-10015) and
here (http://atticusreview.org/may-26-the-dow-closes-down-9974/).

The DJI became a lens for me and as I finished
that project, I started to look for a lens. For the moment, science, especially
physics, has been offering a new viewpoint for me. In the end, it is often
about seeing how these perspectives, sets of knowledge, and vocabularies
intersect with and inform the quotidian.

Part
of what Briante manages to accomplish is to highlight just how little the
general public (and, general reader of poetry) might be attentive to the shifts
of the financial markets, and just how little we actually understand what those
markets mean, despite their insistence upon influencing a variety of aspects of
our lives. As she writes to open the poem “June
4—The Dow Closes Down 9931”: “My heart drops a note, systolic, beats for
you, / Jim James sings on the radio, the radio sings: / yesterday the Dow rose,
a flood. Outside // not a leaf moves, / I can’t feel a single branch, / let
alone the oil in plumes, feathers // of a thousand estuaries. How do you
separate / an individual from life?” And as much I enjoy the poems in this
collection, it is in her prose, the prose-poems, where her work really shines:

April 19

I am no longer certain about the origin of
things. My child does not sleep. So when I recalled the blond haired woman in
the red dress playing a ukulele and my recognition—yes that’s how you learn to
play, with a humble fret board, smaller neck—I could not remember whether I had
seen her on television or in a dream

nor could I find the bit in The Autobiography
of Alice B Toklas about Picasso and Stein turning a corner in Paris to see a
camouflaged tank; Picasso stammering something about it is we who have created
that. His recognition before the tank was aesthetic not systematic.

But mostly I was interested in that turning

or the story about Petit Jean on a fishing boat
who turns to a young Lacan and points to the glimmer of a floating sardine tin.
Do you see it? He gestures to the object sparkling on the water’s surface. Well,
it doesn’t see you.

Ten years ago when I left New York I gave up
the guitar, so when I first saw the blonde-haired woman (wherever I saw her) I thought
that I should have started with a smaller instrument. But as I watched more
closely her intricate fingering, the finest needlepoint, I realized it was not
a matter of ease but of tune.

An instrument might be a string of equations,
technique, process, transaction.

I wanted to fall in love with a procedure, but I
could not fall in love with a procedure because I could not always hear its
song.